Share the Wealth

Economy this, economy that. It's inescapable. On every newscast, in every paper, the global recession is being discussed every minute of every day.

The Strait area is in kind of a bubble in comparison to many places. Our immediate employment situation tends to determine whether we sink or swim (for example, when Stora shut down a few years ago). Even if the rest of Canada is thriving financially, that might not mean we are, and the same goes for when Canada is floundering.

My personal situation, however, is irrelevant to the reality of this worldwide crisis. I feel terrible for everyone who has lost their job, the over 80,000 Canadians in February alone. In the United States, over 2 million people have lost theirs over the past three months. So many regular people are losing their homes, their jobs, even their minds in the struggle to feed their families.

That's what makes this economic disaster so literally unfair: lack of balance.

The wealthy have always been held up as people to be admired, winners by virtue of their personal ingenuity and hard work. Even though a full quarter of the Forbes 500 landed there by way of inheritance, it's common to think of the rich as a special breed. I've even found myself defending the people at the top; after all, most of the time, you can't get to the top unless you earn it, right?

Wrong. Tough times like these can often make grey look much more black and white. George Orwell said that the only difference between rich people and poor people is income. "The average millionaire," as he put it, "is only the average dishwasher in a new suit."

Arguably the biggest factor fueling the public fury over the AIG bonuses in the United States, so unavoidable in the news this week, is the recognition that so many huge fortunes landed in the hands of the undeserving rich. Some of them added little value to the economy in the first place, but merely moved money around in clever ways. Others are corporate executives who were ridiculously overpaid whether they succeeded or failed at their jobs. Luck of the draw and status quo is all that separate these folks from the guy behind the counter at Wendy's. So why should the outcome of their lives differ so dramatically?

When the economy was stable, few thought about the Millionaire's Club with more than a grunt of envy. Now that people are moving in with their children and having to rely on food stamps for supper, the envy is morphing into anger and disgust, and with good reason. The annual salary required to be in the top 1% of income-earners is over $400,000, a number most of us will never see. The spectacle of the Richie Rich types maintaining their lifestyles with multi-million dollar bonuses while the other submerged 99% fight for oxygen seems seriously unbalanced. So what can we do?

Tax them, that's what. The attitude and desperate financial state of the majority accounts for the lack of public outcry over the proposal to increase taxes for the wealthiest Americans - except of course from the wealthiest Americans.

Closer to home, recent government action is causing the same public reactions. People are angered by raises and bonuses to already overpaid government employees. We can't understand why, as pointed out in a letter to the editor last week, a province with deteriorating roads and high unemployment can afford to allocate $100 million dollars to the Olympics.

Similarly, New Brunswick has decided to cut hundreds of non-essential government jobs and programs and put a two-year freeze on wages for civil service jobs. While that doesn't bode well with the civil servants affected, no offence people, but with most making over $100,000 per, you're not really the group we should be most worried about.

It comes down to this: we, rich and poor, all pay the same amount for gas, milk, and electricity. The lack of balance is in the resources we have to pay it. For people with an annual household income of $150,000, contributing a few hundred dollars in extra taxes probably won't seriously affect their lifestyle. But for people making $20,000 annually, that few hundred dollars might make all the difference.

If we squeezed the rich and gave the poor a break, generating mandatory balance, imagine how much more quickly this economic crisis would be solved. Fair? Maybe not. But in times like these, balance is needed more than fairness.